The Greek East Falls

CHAPTER 3 · 200–129 BC · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

Now watch the tan east begin to bleed red, and notice how fast: Rome needed 120 years to break Carthage and about fifty to swallow the world of Alexander. The successor kingdoms — Macedon, the Seleucids in Syria and beyond, the Ptolemies in Egypt, a scatter of leagues and city-states — had fought each other to a sophisticated standstill for a century, wars of maneuver ended by negotiation. Rome does not negotiate; it concludes. Philip V of Macedon, who had unwisely allied with Hannibal, is crushed at Cynoscephalae (197) — where the legion’s flexible maniples first gut the phalanx on broken gro

The turn: Pydna, 22 June 168 BC.

This chapter is one scene of an interactive atlas: the map repaints as the dates advance, campaigns draw themselves, and every chapter argues its causes and consequences — then a field exam asks you to prove it on the map.